I’ve discovered another Mudge, not part of the canonical Mudges, but whose tale is well worth telling. He’s not a Bidefordian, not a Devonian, not even English. This is William Tertius Fitzwilliam Mudge, who was the son of Zachary Mudge, the admiral. In fact, his career was in some ways very similar to that of his father. He was born in Dublin in in 1831, and entered the navy as a 13 year old cadet.
Just as his father had been first lieutenant to George Vancouver on his expedition to the north-east Pacific at an earlier date, so William found himself in the same general area in 1858 when Captain George Richards charted the coast of British Columbia and surveyed Vancouver Island. Apart from surveying, naval officers had many other functions and duties including carrying supplies and mails to the scattered coastal settlements and the various outposts of the Hudson Bay Company, as well as enforcing British law, as police officers and judges, resolving land disputes, negotiating with the indigenous population, and carrying out various scientific observations in the lands they explored.
In 1858, gold was discovered in the Frazer River, and there was a sudden influx of gold-diggers from California into the area, and the Governor of the newly-founded Crown Colony of British Columbia, James Douglas, called for the Royal Navy to prevent this flow of immigrants into Canada, in case this led to the United States claiming the land for itself, so the Navy dispatched HMS Pylades to Victoria, its capital, from the China Station. In command was Capt Michael de Courcy, and William Mudge was one of his officers.
Somewhat later, William Mudge was involved in the San Juan dispute, where a group of islands called the San Juan Islands was occupied by British forces in the north, and American forces in the south, with neither giving way to the other. The stand off went on for twelve years. In the end, the British government, asked Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany to arbitrate, who promptly awarded the entire San Juan archipelago to the United States, a sign of things to come, perhaps. Incensed at this decision, the Canadian government never referred any territorial disputes to London therafter.
Before we leave the area, it is worth noting that William Mudge himself was honoured by having a whole island named after him, as a result of his surveying work, even if it was small and sparsely inhabited.
After leaving this area, he took part in surveying 13,000 miles of the African coast, including Mozambique and Madagascar.
However, the final episode of his naval career was to take place thousands of miles away, in New Zealand. By this time, early settlers were starting to infiltrate the Maori homelands, which led to a series of Maori Wars, which in turn required the intervention of the Royal Navy. In 1861, Thomas Mudge was appointed flag lieutenant of HMS Orpheus, the flagship of the South Pacific squadron, trying to repress the resistance of the Maoris to British occupation. In February of 1863, the Orpheus sank off the west coast of Auckland after hitting a sandbank, and being smashed to pieces by the oncoming waves. Not all the crew were drowned. Out of a total of 259 sailors, 70 were saved, but at least 189 officers and crew were lost. To this day, it remains the worst disaster in New Zealand’s maritime history. What made it even more poignant was that many of the sailors were boys, still ‘learning the ropes’. The average age of those that died was 25. And, of course, one of the officers that drowned was William Tertius Fitzwilliam Mudge. Such is the price of empire.
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